An Electronic Emulator of Combined Photovoltaic and Solar Thermal Systems

An emulator of combined Photovoltaic and Solar Thermal (CPS) systems is presented. In order to carry out early testing on the design of such systems, a - microcontrolled based - hardware board has been designed, implemented and tested. This emulator is able run several typical daily solar irradiation patterns as a function of the seasons and a complete solar thermal and photovoltaic model that depends on a very flexible set of parameters characterizing the real CPS behaviour. By properly varying these parameters many different CPS models can easily be created and tailored to the energy performance needed for a predefined target application. Beside these functionalities, the CPS emulator is also capable to produce a set of output signals whose characteristics match the ones produced by a real CPS system. Moreover the CPS emulator can easily accelerate the real time clock up to 60 times faster, so speeding up the logging phases during tests.